Starla's gone. This will mean nothing to most of you and I am not ready to go into the painful details just yet.

Let's just say that Starla is one of the reasons we are leaving town. So it's sort of Shakespearian that it all came to a dramatic end today.

It's been almost 12 months since she first came to town. And in that short period of time she managed to turn my life into something that you would see on a "ripped from the headlines" crime drama.

Tonight I stood in the bus station, looking at her face, bruised and swollen from the beatings, her neck covered in cuts, her once long and beautiful hair hacked off in several places and I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her that I would make everything okay.

But I can't make it okay. I did not cause the damage and I can't fix her. All I could do was put her on a bus. A bus heading north, back to the father who started the legacy of pain.

All I could do was say goodbye.